Dear America, "Enough is Enough" Is Not Enough Anymore | Teen Ink

Dear America, "Enough is Enough" Is Not Enough Anymore

May 25, 2018
By MatteoDiMaio BRONZE, Cambridge, Other
MatteoDiMaio BRONZE, Cambridge, Other
3 articles 0 photos 2 comments

IT MUST BE really horrible to be a student in America. Same goes for nightclubbers, churchgoers, government workers and party celebrators. Since Columbine, 139 people have died in violent mass shootings. In 2014, gun violence killed 34,000 people, the most recent year for which data is available. We can only imagine how much worse the toll will be this year. In comparison, that year there were just 224 justifiable homicides, where a private citizen used a gun to protect themselves, according to a new study by the Violence Policy Centre (VPC).

 

Where I live, as a student in New Zealand, the latest school shooting happened in 1923. In America, yesterday’s attack on a Texas high school is the 16th shooting to have resulted in death or injury during the first five months of the year.

 

Only other difference? We have much tighter gun regulations. And yet the US needs the students to tell them what they’re doing is not good enough. Soon, surely, there will be a tragedy so painful the whole country cannot forget it.

To those outside the USA it seems this has already happened.

In the aftermath, democratic senators hoping to boost their approval ratings say: “enough is enough” and then seem to forget about it, and any action, until the next tragic event. Well, America, “enough is enough” and this time you’re not going to forget it. You cannot let this massacre become routine. This morning, my mother sighed: “you know there’s been another one of those mass shootings in America.” Another? And yet congress has refused to tighten restrictions on gun ownership. Even safety locks on dangerous “Assault” class rifles, which do not impend the “rightful gun-owner’s” rights, are tossed aside. The Texas shooting yesterday, was undertaken by a boy using his father’s gun. 

“We’re lessening the threshold of how crazy someone needs to be to commit a mass shooting,” Austin Eubanks, who survived the 1999 shooting at Columbine high school, told the Guardian last fall.

 

It would not feel anyway untrue to place the blame on the shoulders of the NRA and the Second Amendment. Overly-powerful lobbies, generally, are bad. But the massive power they hold over congress comes from a relatively small group of people. A 2017 economic impact report by The National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group, claims arms and ammunition production and sales support 141,500 jobs. That is less than 0.1% of total employment in America, fewer than the number of people who work in wholesale bakeries and tortilla manufacturing, and about the same as the number employed in gift, novelty and souvenir shops. A firearms survey carried out in 2015 by Deborah Azreal, a Harvard scientist and her colleagues claims that between a fifth and a third of adults own a gun, which translates into about 3% or 4% of American adults owning half of America’s stock of about 272m guns.

 

So why is this such a hard conflict to resolve, particularly in elections, when the statistics suggest that only a small amount of the voting population hold guns? Does that mean that the US citizens without guns believe that other people should? It is true that surveys suggest that gun ownership is concentrated in an acute demographic with high-voting turnout rates: according to Ms Azreal’s data, 34% of gun owners are aged over 60, while 81% are white and 72% are men.

 

This is why the voices of these terrorised students are going to be so vital next election. At a “Students Speak Up” event on April the 29th, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Schaumburg said “We’re here because of Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, the list goes on. You are doing something about it.” He said he has helped sponsor federal bills “calling for universal background checks, closing the gun show loophole, a three-day waiting period on handguns. These are going nowhere in Congress. I need your help now more than ever.” So while it is clear that middle-aged white republicans are not going to be much help, we can only hope that with the young generation of passionate “March for Our Lives” teenagers gaining voting rights, more will feel inclined to go out and share their feelings.

 

There’s certainly no question as to whether they care. Hundreds of thousands of people have turned up at these sort of events, making them too, if they do decide to turn up at the polling booth, more powerful than the NRA’s lobbyists. Emma González, a teenage survivor of February’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, shared in a powerful rally speech in front of the Capitol building last March, "In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us, 15 were injured, and everyone, absolutely everyone, was forever altered," Let’s hope she’s right, or nothing will change, again. We can only hope that action on the part of voters and Congress will prevent the “Am I Next?” placards students all over the world are carrying from preaching truth.



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This article has 7 comments.


gsteele said...
on May. 29 2018 at 9:46 am
gsteele,
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Machine guns are banned. You need to get educated instead of just parroting propaganda you have been fed by the liberal echo chamber. Look up NFA 34 - the National Firearms Act - and GCA 68 - the Gun Control Act of 1968. It will help you not to embarrass yourself by making such statements. It is ridiculous that you have to worry; there needs to be more effective access control to schools, and the government needs to stop failing to populate the NICS database with the names of those banned from buying guns, and then putting those of them that try in jail - which they do NOT do.

gsteele said...
on May. 29 2018 at 9:38 am
gsteele,
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"Some people, would just rather not live in the fear, everyday, that they might die." Quite correct - and so they, thanks to the Second Amendment, arm themselves so that they are not sheep led to slaughter at the hands of violent scum. Know what a lobby is? It's a group that sees a problem that affects people - real people - and contacts those people, offering to act on their behalf to deflect the abuses that others, with a control agenda, seek to impose on them against their will and best interests. Thank God for agents and lobbies like the NRA, who help forestall repression by a government always reaching out to put more people under its thumb. Our culture is rugged individualism - despite the liberal establishment's best efforts to undermine it - and we will not be made subjects and have our sovereignty taken away just because the weak fear inanimate objects. The evil will always be with us, and the strong will be there to resist them as long as our natural right to self-defense is not stolen from us by a totalitarian mentality that infects the culture. You should really look up what an "assault weapon" is, and discover that procuring one as a citizen is extremely difficult, time-consuming, expensive, rarely done, and never used in other than drug gang wars. AR-15's (Armalite Rifle - 15) are not assault weapons, nor would any such civilian semi-automatic be used in a military assault, because of its lack of firepower. If appearance is all that it takes to make something dangerous, then we should ban pictures of machine guns.

on May. 28 2018 at 9:19 pm
MatteoDiMaio BRONZE, Cambridge, Other
3 articles 0 photos 2 comments
As to my relevance as a teenager from NZ, I, and maybe you, as an American do not, understand what's it like to live in a country where I don't have to worry about such threats everyday. It is only natural to want others to experience this sense of safety.

on May. 28 2018 at 9:16 pm
MatteoDiMaio BRONZE, Cambridge, Other
3 articles 0 photos 2 comments
We can take away guns. Then, as in London's instance, we can take away knives. But still those " hardened criminals in the drug trade who would not be disarmed by gun control" will find other ways to kill and harm. They are always there. Really, as mfigurski80 points out, America's issue is one of culture. A culture nurtured and a people protected by the NRA and other lobbies. Yet somehow all those other people, dare I say "normally moral", seem to be able to live their lives quite happily without assault weapons. Some people, would just rather not live in the fear, everyday, that they might die.

on May. 28 2018 at 5:18 pm
mfigurski80 BRONZE, Malvern, Pennsylvania
1 article 0 photos 1 comment
Please. Guys. Please. I am a school shooting survivor. About four years ago, a grandfather wandered onto our campus and started shooting somewhere in the woods. He was part of the class of '69, or maybe a bit earlier, and he apparently wanted to relieve old times when shooting was a practiced sport on campus. While he was quickly apprehended and arrested, it was very obvious that he never intended to do any harm. This shooting was later included in nationwide shooting statistics like the ones you mention -- alongside the real ones. Please, you have to take most online politicized statistics with a grain of salt (as an intersection between 'internet','politics' and 'stat', I'd guess about 5% of it is an accurate representation of the situation. Statistically insignificant :) ) Either way, this is a highly politicized issue, and there are a lot of very stupid people yelling very loudly right now, on both sides. Not to say that the opinion of New Zealand teenagers isn't useful, but you are simply adding noise to a precarious and mature conversation that America is, seemingly, unable to have even without your input. The second amendment is an integral part of life in many cultures within USA, and there are multiple options to take without sacrificing that culture. Again though, nothing can currently be rationally discussed in larger public circles. TL;DR: You aint helping. Please keep politics out of my teen ink! Alternatively, if you'd like to continue this discussion or start a completely new topic, feel free to PM me.

gsteele said...
on May. 28 2018 at 4:45 pm
gsteele,
0 articles 0 photos 4 comments
It's ridiculous particularly since the solution is to redirect school funding that ends up fattening teacher pay and benefits towards access control mechanisms. While you cite statistics, you fail to provide context; "since Columbine" is a period of 19 years; a "justifiable homicide" number of 224 in 2014 is not representative - possession and display of a personal defense weapon is often sufficient to stop a crime, and even an exchange of fire does not mean death of the assailant. The proper statistic is somewhere between 1 and 2 million times annually, guns are used to stop a crime. 34,000 deaths is 3 times the number of homicides - most committed by hardened criminals in the drug trade who would not be disarmed by gun control - committed; the rest are suicides. Our violence is concentrated in drug gang cities - compare Philadelphia, with strict gun laws and multiple murders and Valley Forge, with perhaps the highest concentration of guns in the states, with essentially no crime. Same state, just 20 miles apart. With over 40,000 deaths a year from auto accidents, should we ban cars? Figures don't lie, but liars can figure - and take numbers out of context in order to sell a bill of goods to those who don't watch closely and know what the numbers really mean. No gun kills anyone without someone exercising free will to pull the trigger. Violence is violence - in the UK, now at the hands of knife wielders. The divisiveness foisted on our society by politicians and propagandists, with a no-longer-hidden agenda of removing the right to self-defense identified and embodied in the bill of rights, is the root cause of the hatred that supplements the murders caused by the predominantly illegal immigrant drug gangs that have flooded across our porous southern border courtesy of a political party that sees them as a voting bloc for the future. Nonetheless, we are acting, and our violent crime rate is decreasing - in no small part because it is risky business when the citizenry is increasingly well-armed, as happened in the US during the Obama reign of terror.

Abby EZ said...
on May. 28 2018 at 2:36 pm
YOU ARE RIGHT! I am a Christian American student, and i find it absolutely ridiculous that I have to worry about my school district or church being next. It could be my school next. Congress needs to wake up! Honor our 2nd amendment. Ban machine guns. Increas background checks.